Rather should have known, and done, better

As a longtime admirer of Dan Rather’s passion, tenacity and journalistic integrity, I’ve been appalled by his shoddy, slipshod work on the story about President Bush’s service in the National Guard.

At 72, Rather has lost none of the hard-charging, go-anywhere, do-anything determination to get the story that marked his rise to the top of the network news hierarchy. But now that drive has taken him to the abyss.

“Will mistake hasten Dan’s departure?” asked a Newsday headline Tuesday, echoing a question that’s been rocketing around newsrooms, talk radio and cyberspace ever since Rather apologized and admitted he’d made “a mistake in judgment” in broadcasting a “60 Minutes” story that said Bush had received preferential treatment in the National Guard.

How do you broadcast an attack on the president of the United States based on documents you haven’t properly authenticated, originating from a source you don’t know, provided by a man who, as the Washington Post put it, has “a history of self-described mental problems [and] who has denounced Bush as a liar with ‘demonic personality shortcomings’ ”?

To longtime Rather critics, many of whom call him “DamnRather,” the answer to that question is that Rather is a liberal, biased against conservative candidates and causes, and he just couldn’t wait to air this story to discredit a Republican president and damage his chances for reelection.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Rather is a liberal. But I’ve interviewed him more than a dozen times over the years, and he’s never even hinted at an ideological position on any issue that’s come up. I would, however, be surprised if Rather took journalistic shortcuts to fulfill a personal political agenda.

He did take journalistic shortcuts on this story, though. He admitted as much when he said, “I deeply regret I wasn’t as good on this story as I should have been.”

I think he wasn’t as good -- as careful, as thorough, as demanding -- for several reasons. The most important may be that his gut instincts and his previous reporting had convinced him that the essence of the story was true -- that Bush had indeed received preferential treatment in the National Guard.

With documents that seemed to support this view, available after a long hunt, in the heat of a presidential campaign, Rather thought he had a good, juicy story, one that would have a major impact. Knowing that other news organizations were pursuing the same story, he didn’t want to risk being beaten.

Those incentives -- those, if you will, biases, a bias in favor of a good story and a bias in favor of being first -- kept him from being as vigilant as he should have been.

Every experienced journalist knows there’s nothing more dangerous than the story that you think is true, that you want to be true, that you know the competition is breathing down your neck on. That’s when your natural skepticism and your good judgment tend to waver. That’s when you have to pull back, take a deep breath and say: “Wait a minute. Let’s be extra careful here. Let’s be sure we’re right.”

His trademark approach

But that’s not in Rather’s nature. He wants to charge ahead, not pull back; he wants to breathe fire, not take a deep breath. He wants to say, “Go get ‘em,” not “Wait a minute.”

That approach has been Rather’s trademark, from his early days in Texas, through his work in Washington, New York and assignments overseas.

His confrontational, bulldog approach has gotten him into trouble on occasion -- perhaps most notably in his exchange with President Nixon at a broadcasters’ convention in Houston in 1974. Annoyed by Rather’s questioning, Nixon asked, “Are you running for something?”

Rather snapped, “No, Mr. President, are you?”

Rather later had a similar confrontation with then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, and he’s even done battle with his own network, as in 1987, when he left the anchor desk in a snit -- and let CBS go black for six minutes -- when the telecast of a tennis match ran long and cut into the first of two scheduled feeds for the evening news.

But personal snits and political confrontations have no place in today’s overheated media climate. With the Internet and cable news capable of sending any story -- any charge, any rumor -- around the world in milliseconds, and with accusations of bias being thrown around like confetti at a New Year’s Eve party, serious journalists with important platforms have to be more careful and more responsible than ever, not less.

As I argued in this space last week, I believe that given the problems we face both at home and abroad today, virtually all the news media have devoted way too much time and space to what Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry did or didn’t do during the Vietnam War. Most voters, I think, are much more interested in the present and the future than the past. They’d like to hear less about Vietnam and more about the candidates’ plans for Iraq, the Mideast, the economy, health care, our continuing dependence on foreign oil, and many major problems this country faces.

Stepping into the “What did you do in the Vietnam War, Georgie?” quagmire was Rather’s first mistake. But his bigger error was stepping into the quagmire so blindly and carelessly.

He can say all he wants to about how he was “lied to” and “misled” and about how his “mistake in judgment” was made “in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism.” But a reporter with Rather’s long and distinguished record should have known that sources often lie and mislead reporters and that a reporter’s good faith is not enough to ensure accuracy. It must be backed up with a careful examination of the facts, the motivations of your sources and the origins of their information.

What’s next for Rather?

Why didn’t that happen on this story? On Wednesday, CBS News appointed Louis D. Boccardi, former president and CEO of the Associated Press, and Dick Thornburgh, former governor of Pennsylvania and attorney general for three years in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, to investigate the network’s handling of the story and to try to answer that question. I hope they’ll also look into why Rather’s producer, Mary Mapes, passed on to a senior Kerry advisor the name and phone number of her source for the Bush documents. That clearly crosses the line between journalism and political activism.

In other recent journalistic transgressions of this magnitude -- fabrication scandals at the New York Times and USA Today, for example -- disclosures and apologies were followed fairly quickly by high-level resignations.

Will this happen at CBS?

Will Rather be fired -- or eased out, announcing that he’s decided to retire earlier than he and CBS had planned?

I don’t think one mistake -- even one this egregious -- cancels out an entire career of good work and loyal service. But if Rather doesn’t leave, who will? Will Mapes be fired? Or will the ax fall on some network executive -- CBS News President Andrew Heyward or maybe Josh Howard, the “60 Minutes” producer?

Stay tuned.

CBS, which has been promoting itself as “America’s most watched network,” is now being watched for all the wrong reasons.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read his previous “Media Matters” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.